With the greater variety of components used on PCBs, smaller passive components and larger IC's with finer ball pitch dimensions, the demands on vision systems to aid PCB assembly (PCBA) rework have increased.
In electronic assembly industry, it is common to use one camera with an optical prism to view the PCB and component simultaneously. All these cameras use prism type optics. In ball grid array (BGA) rework applications, a large field of view (FOV), a high magnification and a high image quality is required during the alignment process, since the component footprints and their pitches are increasingly smaller. Traditionally, an expensive charge coupled device (CCD) camera is used with an expensive and bulky optical zoom lens and a split prism for viewing multiple surfaces at the same time. This increases the cost and complexity of such systems.
As a result, a high definition image, without the imperfections that result from the use of an external optical system, is now required to facilitate the placement of today's components.